Artist's Statement

"As a Cuban immigrant, having left my homeland at a young age, I live in a cultural in-between. Every place I visit or live in continues to build onto an identity that is constantly morphing and evolving. The materials used in my sculptural work, and the forms that they ultimately take are in part inspired by my search for belonging. Relying on the ancient history and relationship with textiles, my work uses fibers and mixed media to translate memories and psychological states into sculptures and site-specific installations. 

My aim is to create alternative worlds that are inviting, somehow familiar, yet uncomfortable and mystical as a way of negotiating my own displacement. Rather than relying on either a native or adopted language, I depend on my artistic practice to share and express an identity that is multilingual and nuanced, a complicated contradiction of silent endurance and Caribbean warmth. My relationship to objects and materials reveals a nation’s collective mentality of scarcity that impels me to hold onto, to repurpose and to reconfigure resources. This idea extends the material’s life and redefines its functionality. Furthermore, relying on our intimate relationship with textiles as a second skin, I emphasize their role as a protective layer shielding us from physical, social, emotional, and spiritual threats. With all of this in mind, my sculptures externalize personal, unseen psychological landscapes into manifestations that range from enigmatic entities to floral designs. 

Rooting myself in craft traditions and the labor of women in the domestic realm, my work is also situated in the disrupted histories and lost traditions of identities operating in diaspora. Deeply affected by colonization and the resulting transculturation phenomenon, more recent waves of migration or exile compels me to use the metaphoric symbolism of weaving, knotting, and wrapping to accumulate, complicate, layer or conceal materials. In a similar manner, individual memories, lives and events compound and define collective and national identities. As a part of this search for identity, I look back to my many memories of Cuba, both the ideal and the indoctrinated. These memories are present within my work as remnants of a life, whisps and threads of a remembered lush tropical landscape, Communist dogma, Catholic belief systems, Marian devotions, West African cultures in diaspora, persistent reverence and the power of ancestral worship.   
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Employing different additive sculptural processes, I accumulate material and build up layers in order to cover, conceal, or complicate surfaces. I also weave, knot, braid, and stitch together materials, reconfiguring color, textures, and surface qualities. My sculptural forms oscillate between the abstract and the figurative, enveloping themselves while revealing and concealing visual information. I investigate my own identity through these works, often referencing or making decisions influenced by memories and notions from my formative years, but aiming to engage in conversation about lost histories, diasporic displacement, collective memories, feminism and overall, a human need to connect and communicate, beyond the limitations of language, time, or geography." 

-Amalia Galdona Broche, 2021

Project Statement: Flowers for the Saints

This series will serve as an offering to past generations, but in particular, to my grandparents, who lived the majority of their lives in the Cuban countryside. Both of my grandmothers were seamstresses, whereas both of my grandparents worked the land. Their relationship with textiles, be it in the physical making and mending of clothes, or through burlap sacks in the harvesting of crops, is of particular interest to me. My grandparents, now all gone, have become figments of a lost history, and metaphors of a legacy squandered. They are mythical, powerful forces, and the aim of this project is to mourn and to offer them, and all our ancestors, flowers in a shared language of textiles. Flowers in this work reference ritual, mourning, a prayer for a future spring, and a rebirth of forgotten truths.
These abstracted floral tapestries are woven as individual panels and stitched together from the center outwards, expanding, growing, spiraling out towards their lost knowledge, and forgotten truths. Though we have had different lives, my grandmothers and I have a commonality in our work with textiles. For them it was a way to survive and to earn money. My grandmothers made and mended clothes for their family and for many others. As seamstresses they were given a piece of clothing or fabric with which to create clothing, in a way, I am weaving this fabric for them, this is my offering.

-Amalia Galdona Broche, 2021

Amalia Galdona Broche, Flowers for the Saints (installation view), knotted textile strips, tinsel, jute and yarn, 2021.
Amalia Galdona Broche, A prayer and a fabric I, tinsel, jute, beads and yarn. 2021.
Amalia Galdona Broche, A prayer and a fabric I and II (installation view), tinsel, jute, beads and yarn, 2021.
Amalia Galdona Broche, Flowers for the Saints (detail), knotted textile strips, tinsel, jute and yarn, 2021.
Amalia Galdona Broche, Flowers for the Saints (detail), knotted textile strips, tinsel, jute and yarn, 2021.
​Amalia Galdona Broche, Flowers for the Saints (installation view), knotted textile strips, tinsel, jute and yarn, 2021.
​Amalia Galdona Broche, A prayer and a fabric I (installation view), tinsel, jute, beads and yarn, 2021.
​Amalia Galdona Broche, A prayer and a fabric II (installation view), tinsel, jute, beads and yarn, 2021.
​Amalia Galdona Broche, A prayer and a fabric I and Flowers for the Saints (installation view), tinsel, jute, beads and yarn, 2021.